|
|
 |
|
Mission to the Unknown and the Daleks Masterplan Mission
to the Unknown and the Daleks Masterplan have to be taken together. Even
though there is a four week gap between them they are all part of the same
thing. And that thing is something huge, something massive, something
unprecedented and unrepeated. I hope the story about it coming about
because the controller's mother liked the Daleks is true. It is much nicer
to think it was commissioned for mummy rather than as a desperate attempt
to cynically squeeze one more success out of the fading Dalekmania. We want more mums making
policy decisions. I'm not a mum but that is my policy decision. I am
however too young (obviously) to have seen it broadcast and too routed in
this universe to be able to watch it on DVD so the Daleks Masterplan was the most eagerly anticipated CD of the
missing stories range. The two episodes on Daleks The Early Years
had stoked me up - this was something I wanted to see. Unlike the other
stories with pieces missing, I really wanted to know what filled the gaps.
Which makes it odd that when the newly recovered episode was released on
DVD I gave up on it after ten minutes. I'm not entirely sure I've ever
finished it. But when I heard the CDs were coming out I couldn't wait. I
imagined what a five CD boxed set would look like (it turned out to look
like a three CD boxed set but with a flap which was so confusing they had
to put a big instruction on the packaging so people wouldn't flood the BBC
with demands for their missing disc). When I found it in WH Smith I
grabbed it immediately. This was before the era of price comparison
websites, 40% off deals and agonising waits for the postman. Back then we
just went out and Though I nearly entered the shadowy world of pirate copies some years earlier for the Daleks Masterplan. K9 Books in Manchester was owned by a chap who – with almost no customers – would chat heartily and freely with anyone who wandered in off the streets. He had very thick glasses which made his eyes look massive and one fanzine said he could even teach Jon Pertwee a “lesson in rudeness”. I don’t know what that means but it isn’t every day you read something like that about someone you vaguely know. Anyway, we were chatting about the Daleks Masterplan and let me know he had the off-air audio tapes. He was thinking about selling copies to his special customers (with covers and everything). I told him I’d definitely be up for a bit of that. Sadly, it never happened and the closest I would come to being part of a network was unknowingly being at the same university as one of this site’s contributors at the same time he was swapping tapes with those in the loop. K9 Books didn’t just let me down over the tapes – they also let me down over the novel. I had found a copy of book 2 in a second hand book shop, possibly in Wales or possibly not in Wales, but nowhere had a copy of book 1. Not even a specialist Doctor Who book store. I tried second hand shops, massive branches of Waterstones and even the merchandise shop at the Llangollen exhibition but everywhere seemed determined not to have it. Finally – finally – I found a copy a year or two later from a lovely shop in Coventry which I’m sad to say has since closed down. It was without a doubt the most fantastic Doctor Who novel(s) I ever read.
The Myth Makers The Myth Makers – what can I say? I’m sorry. I can’t think of a single story I’ve heard/watched less of than this. I know I’ve started it but I’m not sure I’ve ever reached episode two. I promise I’ll listen to it. I really do like history – I’ve got the World at War on DVD. I loved Xena Warrior Princess. I’ve seen both Cate Blanchett “Elizabeth” films and the Glenda Jackson version too. Don’t think of me as a philistine. I would've done Classics at school except that they used Classics as bait to lure people into signing up for Latin. In first year we did six months of Classical Studies and then six months of Latin. Classics was great - utterly useless and probably to blame for generations of inept government of this sceptred isle - but Latin was hideous. Signing up for four more years of Classics would've meant signing up for four more years of Latin and that was unacceptable. German may be the ugliest language on the planet but at last there are still people who speak it and it might come in handy one day. Latin is literally only any good for talking to someone else who speaks Latin and that is much too risky as most other people who speak Latin will have much better grammar than you. It wasn't fair - an ancient school like mine jolly well ought to have taught Classics on its own but maybe someone sat down with the Classical Studies department and told them they could only have one pot of cash and they had to choose between a dead language and a bunch of fucked up gods impregnating a bunch of fucked up women. And the dead language won.
History is great. The Massacre Pass. I remember buying it because it was the first of the missing episode soundtrack CDs to come out on CD. It was also the first to have decent narration as opposed to the Eric Saward / JNT scripts of the early 90s. And it had a different type of jewel case to the subsequent releases. It had a black plastic bit which none of the others have. The cover design was non-standard too. All of which proves I’ve not listened to it. I knew season three would be a struggle.
Post script - I wrote this back in May/June and it made me realise how much stuff I hadn't listened to. Since writing it I've done all the missing pieces of season 3 in the car and enjoyed all of them. But there is no mileage in repeatedly saying "I listened to that in the car a week or two ago" so I've left everything I wrote about not having listened to them in tact. I wasn't even intending to listen to them all in order - I just happened to choose Galaxy Four first and then the Myth Makers and by the time that was done I realised and decided to go for it. Even the Celestial Toymaker was considerably better than I was expecting. The rest I didn't really have any expectation for at all. So this proj - if I can call it a proj - has done me some good. The Ark The first time I ever heard or saw Dodo was the clip in “Resistance is Useless” where the Doctor puts a sign on the Tardis to say it is out of order. Just so a real policeman doesn’t try and open it (even though he couldn’t). Dodo’s “I see what you mean” is delivered in a very deep voice and I was convinced that is how she spoke. I can remember telling my then Beloved that one of the Doctor’s girls had a very deep voice. I did an impression of her. It hurt my throat. That’s how deep her voice was. I finally get to see Dodo (and hear her) and it turns out she didn’t have a really deep voice. It was too late to apologise to my Beloved as she was someone else’s beloved by then (probably) but I felt like a piece of cheese that Saturday morning as another wretched early morning omnibus unfolded before my barely awake eyes. It was fairly painful – I’m in the middle where the Ark is concerned. Part of me thinks it should sit proudly alongside the SBTG stories. Another part of me thinks it is actually just a bad story. There is a nice idea in there but the Monoids are too silly, the humans too feeble and it includes the phrase “galaxy accident” so the writing is more than a little dubious. I’ll take it over something more worthy and it does represent one of the few chances to get Purves in for a commentary but I can’t think of it without remembering those heady days of being in love and doing Jackie Lane impressions. Like we all did when we were young.
She looks like a girl with a deep voice doesn't she? The Celestial Toymaker I didn’t come to the Celestial Toymaker with ideas that it was brilliant. A masterpiece. A groundbreaking piece of television. Any of that nonsense. I hadn’t given it much thought until I got the Hartnell Years video and watched it in my little room at University. Actually, it wasn’t a little room – it was an end room in the most generous hall on campus so it was actually quite a big room. The last part of Toymaker underwhelmed me to an extent but mainly I thought what a bad time the costume designer must’ve been having to put Steven in that jumper and to have given Jackie Lane a dress which made her breasts look jagged. Years later I got the CD and tried to appreciate it for the groundbreaking piece of television it was supposed to be. It turns out it is like a cheap copy of Playschool made in Eastern Europe which turns out to be a death trap. The Toymaker isn't a metaphor, he isn't a god who - in the words of ABBA - makes fun with dice, his mind as cold as ice, while someone way down here, loses someone dear. It isn't an epic or a masterpiece. It is 1950s board games being played on national television. Not unlike card games being played on Sky Sports I admit but after three years of monsters and mayhem it is a bit of a let down to have people playing backgammon (or whatever) for four weeks. Especially in such faux-groovy outfits and with the show's star in Blackpool or Bournemouth or Bognor for a fortnight. You can't make the Toymaker make any kind of sense. It was well cast with the redoubtable Michael Gough but I sat through the tape and later sat through the CDs and thought "Did they really get away with four weeks of that? It's like an episode of Play Your Cards Right but where you know for sure no one important is going to die." The only impressive bit is right at the end when the Doctor keels over but it turns out to be toothache to lead into the next story. Bah. Though I was once so bored at work that I cut some pieces of paper, numbered them and spent an afternoon playing the Trilogic Game. At first it was easy - nothing to it. A piece of pis... oh... how did I... oh... that's going to take ages...
My version was more papery than the original
|
